Checklist

Definition

Checklist

a convention that consists of a list of questions concerning potential defects in a single kind of work product

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, checklists are part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Convention
• Subclasses: None
• Example Instances:
  • Software Design Document Inspection Checklist
  • System Requirements Specification Inspection Checklist

Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of a checklist are to:

• Enable people to perform their tasks more efficiently and correctly:
  • Help developers consider all significant potential types of defects.
  • Ensure that the inspectors have considered all significant types of potential defects.
• Improve productivity.
• Improve the quality of the associated work products by decreasing the incidence of defects.

Guidelines

• Living Document.
  Checklists are often used during inspections, but they can also be used by the producers of the work product to ensure that they consider the main types of defects during development of the work product.
• Living Document.
  Checklists should be living documents that evolve as the types of defects vary as people learn to avoid making them.
• Location.
  In this website, checklists are stored with and primarily accessible via the associated work product.
• Tailoring.
  Inspection checklists should be tailored prior to use to keep it consistent with the associated work product description, content and format standard, and template. The majority of tailoring should be the removal of irrelevant questions or those questions that are not cost-effective to answer. Different endeavors will probably tailor out different questions.
• Automatic Documentation Generation.
  If the document being inspected is automatically generated by an upperCASE tool from a repository by using an existing template, then many questions regarding content and format become unnecessary and they safely may be tailored out.
• Importance.
  Not every question on this inspection checklist will be equally important with regard to their probability of leading inspectors to defects. Every question will also not be equally important with regard to the importance of the impact of the associated defects. The most important questions should be emphasized during the inspection, and questions may be tailored out if they are not cost-effective in finding significant defects.
• Audiences.
  Because this inspection checklist will be used by different people playing different roles on the software inspection team, not all questions will be equally relevant to everyone. Thus, engineers will be more interested in engineering questions whereas quality engineers may be more interested in questions designed to ensure conformance with the associated content and format standard. Thus, everyone need not answer every question and everyone should not spend the same amount of time answering each question.
• Answers.
  The questions should be consistently written so that answering “no” implies the existance of a defect in the work product.